The present invention relates to a new and improved construction of automatic railless ground conveyor installation of the type comprising a passive guide track which defines the route or stretch network and individual driverless or unmanned traveling conveyor cars, each of which are equipped with a steering mechanism which scans in a contactless manner the guide track as well as a work control mechanism which, by means of a code reader, scans in a contactless manner individual code markings or markers arranged at branches and influences the steering mechanism in the sense of reaching a target or destination determined by a target code set at the work control mechanism.
Such type automatic trackless ground conveyor installation has been disclosed, for instance, in German patent publication 1,481,482, corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 3,474,877. The conveyor cars of such ground conveyor installation contain as the code reading mechanism or reader at least one of a number of reading elements responsive to the marking locations, and wherein in each case the reading element corresponding to a target or destination code can be switched so as to be in a preparatory receiving state and upon acting upon a branch by means of the code markings directly determine through the agency of the work control mechanism the travel directions of the branch. However, with such prior art ground conveyor installations it has been found to be disadvantageous that the code reader mechanism, which is independent of the steering mechanism which scans in a contactless manner the guide track, is relatively complicated and expensive. Furthermore, there are present certain difficulties in properly guiding the code reader mechanism over the code markings along the conveying path such that there is realized a faultless scanning operation.